Star Wars Sim OOC Discussion Thread

[Sonic Glitch]

He had enough devices to blow up every planet in any one empire, and then some.

Indeed. And how would they be deployed, exactly?

Very carefully.

[Nickswitz]

In ships, they were all equipped on my small ships, so it wouldn't have been too difficult to deploy them.

[Tyyr]

Looks like Alpha is dead and buried so time for fun!

I'd expressed an interest in joining Alpha a long while back but there wasn't really any place for me. Then Big came to me wanting to know if I'd be willing to play the bad guy. I told him I'd be happy to. So together we worked up the Taiidan. My marching orders were to go in and pick a fight, a big one. I had an economy to make a real fight of it. I told him I'd do it, but also warned Big that I'd do everything I possibly could, beg, borrow, cheat, and steal to wipe every one of you out.

So I got my military, I actually entered the game with only 35 million CR. My initial plan was to hit the Klingons from the south east, come in, raise Quonos, and just gut the Empire. Big more or less nudged me in the direction of exterminating the Ferengi. I agreed and launched my attack. I did it as quickly and brutally as I could. I was notified there were Fed ships hanging out in Ferengi space, so I blasted them. The Ferengi weren't willing to immediately surrender? I nuked their capital city and asked them to reconsider. The Kazon weren't willing to GTFO? Exterminate them. The Packleds were willing but slow? Throw their asses across the border into the Fed just to be an economic drain. I did my best to establish that the Taiidan were not nice, didn't give a fuck, and were overall very bad people. Just to drive it home I even started the forced augmentation of the remaining Ferengi populace.

I kept up the migrant fleet thing and the great enemy simply as a ruse, and not a very good one, to obfuscate things while I regrouped for the attack on the Klingons. The Ferengi weren't worth much but I did get my hands on their drones. Cheap and easy to produce I used them as suicide recon devices and shotgunned Klingon and Romulan space with them to find anything and everything of import. I managed to destroy over 70% of the Kligons antimatter and ore production and stocks along with two of their three shipyards and most of their starbases along the Romulan border. I got a bit greedy with Quonos but I did get to see ya'll's fleets in action. Outnumbered 3 to 1 I still managed to give as good as I took when you guys should have probably annihilated me in one turn flat. You had some kind of modern art thing going on with your deployments and tried to get cute with your cloaks which really didn't work.

The "war" didn't really amount to much. A lot of words, a little maneuvering and then I sucker punched the Cardassians. You don't get to be neutral and still let the combat vessels of one of the waring powers use your space to stage out of. The battle of Orias was... frankly kind of hilarious. The final tally was 80 to 1 in favor of me. I decided to push the whole, "WE'RE BAD" thing even farther by nuking a Cardassian city to try and get the remnants of the Cardies and Turei to decloak and fight. They didn't, whatever. However... they did leave me a treat. The Cardies apparently forgot they had damaged but undestroyed ships out there and aboard them I got my hands on quantum torps and phase cloaks. JACKPOT!

Then came the attempted genocide of the Ferengi. I say the Ferengi because aside from some militia level gropos there were no Taiidan in any significant numbers in the Ferengi occupation zone. You were looking at killing over 10,000 Ferengi to get 1 Taiidan grunt. As the wave of destruction rolled over the FKI I was laughing my ass off. I really could not stop laughing uncontrollably. It was perfect. I knew the war was over at that point. I could turn this into a peace treaty of some sort. Given that at this point my main worlds were still undiscovered I figured I'd have to spend a decade not doing much of anything and rebuilding but I'd survive.

Then I got the peace treaty and... words failed me, continue to fail me. You let me keep my fleet. I was the aggressor. I conquered the Ferengi, exterminated the Kazon, threw the Packleds off their homeworld, was forcibly augmenting conquered people to use as slave labor. I'd attacked the Klingons for no good reason and gutted their infrastructure while my indiscriminate bombardment killed 60 billion Klingons. And you let me keep my fleet. YOU LET ME KEEP MY FLEET. There weren't even any stipulations in the treaty about under what circumstances I could do anything with it I just got to keep it. I had to put it in mothballs but whatever. I thought you might get suspicious that I just accepted the repayment of the Klingons without a peep but really, a repayment plan that totally lacks any schedule? Why would I object to a document that says I owe the Klingons all that money but that I never actually have to pay any of it back? Hell, even the clauses about the Ferengi getting to vote on their final dispensation had no qualifiers about anything like Federation observers to make sure things went well. I could have just kept asking each Ferengi leader if they'd accept my rule and shoot the dissenters until I got the vote I wanted and been completely kosher with the treaty.

I mean really the pros and cons of that war:
Pro: Destroyed 70% of the Klingon industrial capacity.
Pro: Gained quantum torpedo and phase cloak tech.
Pro: Gained recognition of my territorial claim of the Ferengi worlds.
Pro: Destroyed significant numbers of Cardassian and Turei combatants.
Pro: Got the Cardies to drive a wedge between themselves and the ISA.
Con: Lost 1/3 of my fleet in an even exchange with the allies.
Con: Lost the use of my remaining fleet, that you knew of, for 1 year.

Hell, the treaty with the Cardies even netted me a few more worlds I could colonize on their southwest border and a base on their northwest border.

Thanks to my economy I could replace the losses I'd incurred in not even two years. I don't imagine Big thought ya'll would actually make peace with the Borg-Nazis but ya'll did. Which is of course where things got out of hand. Simply put I had an economy sized to reinforce me during an active and bloody war so I could draw the fight out and make it a good end to the sim. The only thing is that in spite of my best efforts that war ended very quickly with very few losses. I now had a peace to use as a shield while I put my economy to work cranking out quantum torp armed ship after phase cloaked ship. Literally thousands of them. Upgrading my ships with QT's increased their CR's dramatically. I drove quickly for the 100 million CR mark and passed it. I kept going though, aiming for 150 million and by my calculations my economy would have managed it.

During this time I tried to be the biggest ass I could. Sending you a mind wiped admiral, beginning repaying the Klingons 1 credit per year just so they know I hadn't forgotten about them. Finally reactivating my fleet after... what two or three years in mothballs? I was pushing as hard as I could to make one of you attack me. I even tried to take the remainder of the Cardie's dreadnoughts but the Federation over stepped their bounds and tried to stop it.

Then the Cardies tried to join the Coalition. I didn't expect much to come out of it. Honestly I expected that the Cardies would do it and the status quo of two glaring superpower blocks would resume leaving me in the ugly position of a potentially reunified powers block when I started shit again. Still I took a swing at it, showing the Fed what the Cardies were up to and making the proposal that so long as they stayed neutral and out of it, and ensured their borders remained closed (effectively shielding both my actual homeworlds and the occupation zone from the Klingons) I'd curb stomp the Cardies and put a government in power that would be far more willing to work with the ISA. Of course what I meant by that is installing a Taiidan government since I was already trying to buddy up to the ISA as best I could. It was a perfectly in character bit of dickheadishness. I really didn't expect it to go anywhere.

And then it did.

To my amazement the Fed bit, and bit hard. They didn't make me clarify "agreeable government," they didn't ask for any assurances at all. They took my proposal at face value and announced their neutrality moving forward. It was beautiful. I had what I needed, the ISA split and isolated so I could go curb stomp the Coalition. Not only that but I had proof of the Federation's double dealings and violating pretty much every principle they held dear. If the Fed ever got uppity while I sent home Breen bodies in icecube trays and gave every Klingon their wish to die in battle I could just trot out this little tidbit and watch as at a minimum the Federation went into a tailspin and hopefully the entire ISA would just implode as their biggest member violated every principle of the organization.

So I had my massive invasion fleet charging into Cardassian space in a two pronged attack. The first hitting the Dominion shipyard with intent to capture. The second blowing through the border and heading for Cardassia at top speed. All behind a shotgun blast of phase cloaked probes both in Cardie space but also starting to head farther up north to chart the area around the Breen and prep to charge into Breen space when the inevitable happened.

I knew how close the Coalition and Cardies were to an agreement so the Breen jumping in didn't shock me so much as it was all part of the plan. I had always wanted someone to declare war on me so I could dodge the aggressor card. The Cardassians didn't have a chance, they were outnumbered (in CR terms) about 5 to 1. They weren't going to last two weeks. The Breen, well I expected it to take a little bit longer for the Breen to reinforce the Cardies but even when they did I still held a 5 to 2 advantage. The war plan was to wipe out the Cardie and Breen fleets in about six weeks and drive hard for the northern Breen border. I'd bring up follow on forces to start taking key worlds, capturing a few key starbases and getting ready for the Klingons to finally make it all the way around to where I was waiting. My drones would search the entire northern area for bases that might support the Klingons and I'd take them out. In the end I expected the Klingons to arrive and face about 2 to 1 odds with so many ships on clean up detail and have no bases that could support the kind of long term dedicated attack it would take to dislodge me from Cardassian and Breen territory. At that point we'd have to see how it would go. However I'd have the Cardassian and Breen territories to mine for slave labor to help pump my economy while my shipyards, including the Dominion one now, went apeshit.

My preference at that point would be to push the war with the Klingons, make it around the horn and come driving down through the Romulan territories to finish the job I started. That would require the ISA to continue to stay out of it. Dunno how that would go but I suspect I'd have to drop the Federation bomb on them at some point and see how it went. At the very least it would keep the Fed off my back for a bit and even one turn would be enough for me to erase the Turei and Sheliak at a minimum.

And if things went real south there was always the Ragnarok option. You know what a phase cloaked drone is? A baby dreadnought that you can't stop. Even if I was going down I'd take you all with me if it came to that.

TL;DR version, I was doing everything I could to pick a fight, ya'll did everything you could to avoid it along with making some horrible, horrible decisions that kept me in the game. You've got no one to blame but yourselves. Welcome to the Directorate blunts.

[BigJKU316]

As a reference point on construction capabilities I will give you all these numbers as of the end of original alpha. Essentially the big 4 (Feds, CU, Breen, Klingons) were building about 1.5 times the rate of the Taiidan. If you add in the Gorn and Tueri and have the Feds and CU come up to full capacity (the Breen and KE and Taiidan were close) then the allies were probably building at a rate over twice as much combat power per turn as the Taiidan. The overall yard capacities were not really comparable. The Feds and Klingons combined have more yard space than the Taiidan 2.8 vs 2.7 million. Both alliance (UFP, CU, Tueri, Gorn) and (KE and Breen) were within 100,000 or so tons per year capacity of the Taiidan. Both alliances had a combined GDP well in excess of the Taiidan and both the UFP and KE had government revenue in excess of the Taiidan which would have made a huge difference in just how big each power block could have gotten.

The Taiidan were basically an attempt to close out the game on my part. Mistake or not that is what happened and I made it because I felt the small powers were basically marginalized at that point due to the scale of growth and wanted to wrap things up. The next sim, for those who elect to participate, will be much more even powers so everyone can have as much or as little impact as they wish and overall power and starting conditions can't be held responsible.

[Reliant121]

A good game played on Tyyr's part, I think. Although, You'd have struggled to get into the black cluster unless you'd manage to pillage the engine modifications needed to get into it without grinding to a halt. Still, you'd have got there eventually.

[Tyyr]

And I fully intended to reopen our discussion about genocide, this time with visual aides.

[stitch626]

So that's how everything happened. I must say, I expected them to wipe you out. I would have (had I a military beyond some guys in his basement with a pocket knife).

[Reliant121]

No surprises there

[Lt. Staplic]

lol. Well played, I think one of the most telling factors, and one that BIG underestimated was our desire to keep playing rather than fight it into the ground if possible. hence our peace treaty and the multitude of other bad decisions, of which I can probably claim the worst.

[BigJKU316]

lol. Well played, I think one of the most telling factors, and one that BIG underestimated was our desire to keep playing rather than fight it into the ground if possible. hence our peace treaty and the multitude of other bad decisions, of which I can probably claim the worst.

And I will be brutally honest about why I thought things needed to wrap up. Lots of the smaller powers were turning in identical turns for 5 or 10 turns or turning in nothing at all.

[Deepcrush]

Mind me, I'm just fumming over how things fell apart.